A unique take on science fiction, Yōko Ogawa's dystopian novel about a world where disappearance is a way of life is a marvelous reflection on loss, memory and human resistance
Ogawa’s 1994 novel The Memory Police places the reader on an unnamed island cut off from the rest of the world, where 'disappearances' are part of the inhabitants' everyday routine. Slowly but surely, various things 'are disappeared' from the island, some leaving a more noticeable sense of loss than others: roses, calendars, birds, hats. A sense of loss which is nevertheless temporary, because people there easily forget. When roses disappear, not only the physical flowers are taken away, but also the memory of roses and the meaning attached to the word ‘rose’ vanish from the islanders’ minds. The Memory Police ruthlessly patrols the entire island, making sure that no object which is reminiscent of a disappearance remains.
The novel centres around the narrator, a novelist orphaned from a young age, her editor R. and her trusted friend, an old man who lives near her house. R. happens to be one of the special people on the island: the narrator soon discovers that he is immune to the disappearances. His mind is a repository of everything that ‘has been disappeared’ from the island: he remembers everything. After this discovery, the narrator decides to hide R. into a hidden room in her house to shelter him from the eyes of the totalitarian regime, and thus creates a memory box, a place where memories are preserved while the island fades further into nothingness, disappearance after disappearance.
The Memory Police is a hauntingly beautiful reflection on how memory works through association: we remember an object not because of what it is in itself but thanks to the memories it evokes in us. Physical objects are repositories of an intricate pattern of cultural and personal meanings: they tell a story, miraculously exhume distant moments from the abyss of time, interlace with experience. After a disappearance, the inhabitants do not solely lose an object they were used to, but also the precious constellation of meanings hidden within it. Slowly deprived of objects and the litany of words, memories and meanings which secretly inhabit them, the inhabitants' hearts and souls grow “thinner”, paler, like the snow which seems to fall incessantly on the island.
Parallel to the novel’s narrative is the story the protagonist is writing, a novel about a mute woman who falls in love with her typing instructor; a romance which soon takes a disturbing turn, as the woman ends up locked up in a tower by her lover who makes her his voiceless prisoner. The narrative briefly stops being interspersed with snippets of the protagonist’s novel when books ‘are disappeared’ from the island, and she is left to cope with the existential void the loss of words has opened in her soul.
On the day when novels disappear, everyone on the island contributes to the burning of books. A significant moment occurs when the narrator, whilst throwing a book into a fire, notices how its trajectory resembles that of a bird taking flight; thanks to the power of association, the memory of birds, long disappeared from the island, temporarily resurfaces in the narrator’s mind. This is why despite the disappearance of books, she is slowly able to regain a feeble acquaintance with words and to finish her novel, even if “the lines [are] growing weak and shaky and in places vanishing altogether, as though the words themselves were weeping”. This is the power the flimsy dimension of words confers us, after all: the gift to “write about something you can’t see as though you can see it. [To] make up something that doesn’t exist”.
Eventually, the islanders’ greatest fear turns into a grim premonition: the people themselves are disappeared from the island. Initially they have to make do with a ghost leg, then without the use of an arm. At the end of the novel, when only the narrator’s voice is left, soon to disappear into thin air, her manuscript is still intact, alongside tiny objects salvaged from oblivion, bottled distillations of memory – a pack of mints, a music box, a harmonica.
More than a science fiction novel, The Memory Police is a philosophical contemplation of loss and death, and a poignant tribute to our incredibly feeble yet persistent efforts to counteract them. It is a brave exploration of the lives of humans who carry on living and loving alongside the constant intimation of obliteration and mortality, and of the faint, translucent traces they wish to leave during their brief (dis)appearances on earth. ♦
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